Wednesday, April 1, 2009

"India is my country and all Indians are my brothers and sisters. I love my country and I am proud of its rich and varied heritage."

What a fucking joke.

Look! he mocks at our country, his country. Look! he is mocking at me ... and you, and we are laughing our hearts out. We laugh our hearts out and it hits our gut like a sharp knife or maybe an empty Johnnie Walker bottle. The empty Johnnie Walker bottle is stabbed in our stomachs, we twinge for a while and laugh out louder. Beacuse this is how we are, this is what we are. We will say 'Indians are dirty people' and spit on roads, we will get away with throwing an empty wafer packet in the open by saying 'India is an open dustbin' we will stick chewing gums under class desks and we will write 'chintu loves madhu' on historical monuments. We will not regret it. Why should we? We are the largest democracy in this world, don't you know?

"I shall strive to be worthy of it. I shall pay respect to my parents and my teachers and treat everyone with courtsey. To my country and my people I pledge my devotion. In their well being and prosperity alone, lies my happiness. Amen"

Yeah thats right: we all live in the world's greatest democracy here. What a fucking joke.

I think this is the first ever book that I completed in a few hours. But I wish to quote that if this guy got the booker then so could have Chetan Bhagat got it.

He shows you the reality. Chetan tries to show it. There is not much of a difference except the fact that this one was like Madhur Bhandarkar's Page 3 and The three mistakes was Farah Khan's Main hoon na.

I think I quite figure out what these Booker people are looking for in a book. When it was Arundhati Roy we had the moth that Papachi discovered. Here we have the ogre hanging from the rearview mirror. With these people, repetition never gets sucky. But there is a difference between this guy and Arundhati Roy or Kiran Desai. Not everyone can finish The God of Small Things or The Inheritence of Loss. But it is quite possible to finish this one. He is not sublte with his descriptions. He does not talk about coconut trees and backwaters, beautiful mountains and cottages, neither does he talk about communists and naxals. He speaks brutal truth, which seems quite possible.

"Now the rallies were done. The priest celebrated a special pooja to pray for the great socialist victory, mutton biryani was distributed in paper plates in front of the temple and in the evening, there was free booze for all."

The satire is amazing. It brings a smile to your face and fills your heart with an unknown pathos. When you start reading God Of small things melancholy will grip you. This one with its caustic language from the beginning gives you this impression of someone constantly jeering at you.

It seems so true, each and every word.

"A group of farmers came to the headquarters and weren't allowed inside and shouted something or the other and left. A TV van came to the headquarter and honked, they were let in at once."

Biting reality, hanh? The irony is that we will read it, nod our heads and say "how true" "oh he shows you the real India" and perhaps forget it in a few days. I shall do the same..